Kid at heart

There is a baby-shaped hole in my heart.

My life at Georgetown had at least seven hours of kid time built into my schedule on a weekly basis. I taught dance to little ones at the YMCA with Dance DC, and I volunteered in the Child Life Department at GU Hospital -- playing and socializing with the kids in the pediatric ICU and the Hematology/Oncology Unit. I was even promoted to "cuddler" senior year (you know, kind of a big deal), which just meant I wore a different colored volunteer vest and was allowed to hold babies in the NICU. I saw a lot of sad things in the PICU and NICU and even grew attached to a few kids who didn't survive their diseases. But I loved seeing the same little face smiling at me from room 5301 every Tuesday and Thursday; I loved nearly falling asleep with a chubby baby in my arms after a long night in the library; and I loved seeing the kids at the Y get excited about dancing, even amidst their fits of bouncing off the walls (literally).

Performance day at the YMCA.

Now, though, the only kids I see are the ones wandering past the Culinary Training kitchen from the Early Learning Center with their parents in tow. I do have a great vantage point from my desk to adore them, but that gets creepy and I don't get to play with them. There were the occasional young clients at Bread and Roses during the summer (who brought me both great joy and great sadness), but thankfully they're all attending school by now.

This is all reason why I'm grateful to have my kid volunteers around at Bread and Roses. Yes, they have a lot of energy. Yes, they spill a lot of things. But they are so genuinely eager to help and so precious while they do it. One of my twenty-something volunteers convinced this sixth grader yesterday that every time he buttered a piece of bread he had to make a "whoop" sound -- loud but hilarious. Another girl was stopped dead in her tracks when I responded to her sassy question about serving spaghetti at breakfast time by explaining that a lot of these folks wouldn't eat until they came back the next day. It's exciting to think that I might be shaping -- ever so slightly -- these kids' perceptions of service and homelessness. I know that service during my youth, whether wrapping presents with my dad for the McKey Christmas Club or making and distributing sandwiches with my Girl Scouts troop, truly fostered an attitude of service in me. Hopefully the same will be true for the kids who come through B&R...hopefully I can show them how fun service can be, and how easy it is to treat every person with dignity.